“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

Most of us tend to avoid failure. We’d rather see ourselves victorious at the finish line then tending to a damaged ego and attempting to determine where things went wrong.

Clear-cut success and triumph offer a cleaner path, while failure is simply a breeding ground for lessons – lessons that can sometimes be tough or even painful to learn.

But the truth is, the most successful people in the world endured mountains of failure before reaching the peak of success; and it was those failures that actually prepared them for what came next. Could it be then that failure can help you succeed? Click Here to Read Article …

For me, salary negotiations have always been a bit of a stumbling block, an awkward dance between speaking my mind while also appeasing an employer or potential employer. There seems to always be a magic number, but neither party is anxious to disclose what their magic number is right off the bat. Click Here to Read Article …

Freelance writers need portfolios of their writing. They are necessary for getting work and for establishing your status as a working, professional technician of prose.

The ideal set-up is to have and maintain a portfolio online. This can be on your own website, a professional networking site, or even a blog you establish just to post your work in the form of a portfolio.

The important thing is to have a collection that you use expressly for that purpose, not a site on which you just happened to have posted a few pieces a while ago, and not a bunch of links you e-mail potential clients. The portfolio must be created, designed, manicured, and maintained specifically for the sort of freelance work you’re seeking.

And the sooner you engineer it, the better. When you begin seeking a number of freelance assignments, have your portfolio stocked, adding and deleting as your professional life progresses.

The overarching concept guiding the building of a portfolio is to think of it as one cohesive piece. Many of the concepts below are components of this. Click Here to Read Article …

Do you wake up at the crack of dawn tired but knowing you have to get to work? Do you check your messages from your smart phone before you even pull back the covers in bed? How about skipping breakfast or lunch because you feel like you just have to much to do?

What about your email? Do you find that the sheer volume of email you get every day is growing at an alarming rate? Do you leave work later than you’d like to or take work home with you? The more we work, the more it becomes a job in itself to get things done. Face it, sometimes you just want to hit delete and start all over again.

More and more of us are finding ourselves in this situation, and it really shouldn’t have ever reached this point when something a simple as a nap might alleviate the issue. Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. So when there’s more to do, we invest more hours or more time.

But time is finite – you can never get more. There is no app that creates a 26 hour day. That means many of us feel we’re running out of time, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work. The truth is, it’s exhausting. Click Here to Read Article …

Many people aspire to be a manager, but what we really need are leaders.

If you want to be a leader of people rather than just managing them, there are a number of characteristics that you should seek to attain and practice.

The late and great management guru Warren Bennis once said “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial”.

You’re an entrepreneur whose business and brand is yourself. You’re in charge of setting schedules, establishing financial goals, and at the foundation of it all, you’re in charge of your brand—you.

As you grow and develop as a freelancer in any field, you’ll be known by your work and your reputation. To command the amount of money that you’re worth, you’ll need to learn to build up a brand of who you are and what people can expect when dealing with you.

This concept can be one of the most difficult for people new to the industry to get invested in.

Many of the people going through this process now have grown up with the internet, making personal connections and publishing content at their discretion. It can be hard to think of personal communication as part of your business, but one must learn to think about everything one posts on the internet.

Some people think that fun and a sense of humor have no place at work, that work is very serious business.

Our advice to them? Lighten Up.

There’s a reason that Google has a giant waterslide on its main campus, and that tons of companies have ping pong tables, video games, or free popcorn to eat while watching movies on the giant screen at work.

It’s because the management at these well-respected firms have figured out that employees who work hard like to play hard too.